Transdisciplinary Responses to Global Challenges

Call for papers until28 February 2014 to EMCSR Symposia

EMCSR 2014 is scheduled for 22-25 April 2014 and will take place in Vienna hosted by the University of Vienna. The theme is Civilization at the Crossroads: Response and Responsibility of the Systems Sciences. The term “systems sciences” is meant to denote every scientific endeavor that deals with systems and connects to the term “systems”; thus it includes disciplines such as systems engineering or systems thinking and systems philosophy. (http://emcsr.net/)

Symposia Topic: "Responses to Global Challenges"
Promoted by Søren Brier and Liqian Zhou, Dept. of International Business Communication, Copenhagen Business School

Past approaches, including modernistic and post-modernistic ones, have partly failed to deal with the global challenges, as the nature of modernistic approaches most often consist in various forms of subject area specific reductionisms attempting to reduce complexity to simpler forms and models; be it physical elements (mechanism), or computational of informational elements (pan-computationalism or pan-informationalism) bypassing subjectively and intersubjectively based meaningful experience To the dilemma of modernisms attempts to reduce our complex world by erasing the diversity of reality, the answer of postmodernism has been to construct “little narratives” with no demand of coherence or truth giving up on basic claims of science. Past approaches have thus in different ways created gaps between nature and culture as well as between different cultures including many conflicts between humans and environment, between different cultures as well as paradigms, world views and meaning horizons, in the attempts to globalize by integrating the local views through universal reductions.

Because the technologies of information and communication makes freely flowing information disseminate globally, the problem is not primarily technological and quantitatively but how to organize transdisciplinary as well as transcultural frameworks of interpretive power. For instance the CIA and FBI had all the necessary data to prevent the terrorist of 9/11, but their organizing capabilities were unable to establish the necessary power of interpretation of their data.

An objective, probabilistically founded concept of information as “information processing paradigm” as we see it in traditional cybernetics, systems and information science is no longer enough, because information is not only something digital in physical carriers, but also a difference that makes a difference for living embodied experiential and cultural systems.

This is why technical information or discourse analysis alone cannot bridge nature and culture. We need to find ways to integrate third-person and first-person views with technology through combining systems theory and cybernetics with more phenomenological, hermeneutical as wells a semiotic and linguistic interpretive frameworks by enlarging the scope of reality to include not only physical things and objective information, but develop transdisciplinary frameworks capable of integrating physical, biological, perceptual, experiential cognitive, linguistic and cultural-social communicative systems without reducing one to the other. We therefore welcome work that attempts to build such framework(s). See http://emcsr.net/calls-2014/calls-for-papers-2014/

Brier, S. 2013. Cybersemiotics: a new foundation for transdisciplinary theory of consciousness, cognition, meaning and communication, in Liz Swan (Ed.)(2012). Origins of Mind, Springer book series in Biosemiotics, Berlin, New York: Springer.

Brier, S. 2013. Transdisciplinary view of Information theory seen from a Cybersemiotics point of view, in Ibekwe-San Juan, F. and Dousa. T. Fundamental notions of information, communication and knowledge: Its effects on scientific research and inter-disciplinarity, New York: Springer.